Snap

Cofounders, Snap

Snap

Cofounders, Snap

CONSUMER TECH, 2014: Spiegel and Murphy are planning a potential $25 billion IPO for Snap (the new name for Snapchat), which makes them look prescient for having turned down a $3 billion acquisition offer from Facebook. Snap recently debuted its first hardware product, sunglasses that take and share video.

Snap has entered the 'Twitter zone,' a lot faster than expected. The once-thriving social app missed expectations for revenue and user growth in its first quarter as a public company. Investors reacted by dumping its shares, sending their value down by as much as 19% percent in after-hours trading.

Investors will be eager to hear any insights Facebook shares on its plans to invest in augmented reality and virtual reality (and sales of Facebook's Oculus headset), updates on video monetization and viewership and plans to monetize messaging.

Twitter shares popped more than 10% to $16.13 in pre-market trading on Wednesday after the company reported first-quarter earnings and user growth that beat analysts’ estimates. The company, however, reported its first quarterly revenue loss.

Instagram's Stories feature has surpassed Snapchat in daily active users. Instagram's eighth-month old format is now used by more than 200 million people every day, up from 150 million people in January.

Facebook launched a new Stories feature in its flagship app, after earlier debuting a version of Stories in Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger. The feature allows users to posts photos and videos to a Story chain, enhanced with masks, frames and interactive filters, that disappears after 24 hours.

Shares of Snap Inc., maker of the popular messaging app Snapchat, began trading on Thursday at $24 per share on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker SNAP, giving the company a market cap of about $33 billion. The stock opened 41% above the shares’ pricing Wednesday night of $17 apiece.

Even if Snapchat accelerates user growth this year, it’s beginning to tap out of its youthful demographic. Sooner or later, the company will need to attract a broader set of users. Given that Snapchat is already confining itself to developed markets, the app has only one direction to go: Older.

Snap Inc., which created the popular messaging app Snapchat, said in a regulatory filing on Thursday that it plans raise up to $3.2 billion in an initial public offering that would value the company at between $16.2 billion to $18.5 billion. The company plans to price its shares between $14 and $16.

Even though Snap is one of Facebook's most important competitors, a key figure in the messaging company's first public filing, the S-1, show just how far the young business has to go before its advertising engine can catch up to Facebook's.